Performers - Part 13

Rudolf Nureyev

We turn from opera to ballet.  Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993) was born in Siberia to a family of Tatar Muslims so poor that sometimes they had to strip bark off of trees to eat.  At age 7 his mother snuck the family in to see a ballet performance, and from then on, ballet became his passion and his road to escape.  He was talented enough that at age 17 he was accepted into the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, one of Russia's premier ballet companies.  He soon became a principal dancer and the star of the ballet world in the Soviet Union.

In 1961, the Kirov Ballet was on tour in Paris.  Nureyev was told to return to Russia while the rest of the company would go on to London.  He smelled a trap, and he was right.  He was gay, and his homosexuality had been discovered by the KGB.  Instead of returning to Russia, Nureyev defected to the West.  This caused a sensation – he was the first major Soviet artist to defect.

Soon after defecting, he met Erik Bruhn, a celebrated Danish dancer, and the two were lovers on and off for 25 years.  Above is a photo of Nureyev (left) and Bruhn (right).

Nureyev was photographed by Richard Avedon in 1961, the year he defected.  He was 23 years old.

Another 1961 photo of Nureyev by Avedon.

This rear view by Avedon was shot in 1967.

In 1977, Nureyev sat for a series of portraits by American artist Jamie Wyeth.  None of the finished paintings are nude, but the sketch above is.  It's called Nude Three-Quarter Figure Nureyev (Study #18), and, along with Wyeth's other Nureyev portraits, it's in the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadd's Ford, PA.

We end with a clip from the 1977 move Valentino, in which Nureyev played the title role of the silent film actor Rudolph Valentino.  In this clip we get both rear and frontal views of him.

In the late 1980s, Nureyev came down with AIDS.  He died of AIDS complications in 1993.  What was his legacy?  In a 2018 documentary, one of the people who knew him from his early years at the Royal Ballet in London said, "Before Nureyev, male dancers were porters. They were there to hold up the women and only that. It took this fighting man, this animal, this hungry peasant to change ballet."